[-empyre-] Fw: music in Second Life -John von Seggern

["Melinda Rackham" <melinda@anat.org.au>]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "John von Seggern" john.seggern@native-instruments.com

Hi everybody -- I'm relatively new here but I've been blogging about SL and
related topics for awhile and I frequently DJ in-world as Johnvon Watanabe, also
have my own club for experimental electronic music called 'Vibration Institute.'

Anyway I thought this latest post about the significance of music in SL might be
interesting to this list:

http://www.johnvon.info/2007/08/significance-of-music-in-second-life.html


The Significance of Music in Second Life
this post co-written with J. LeRoy

Music has always been a social art form, created and enjoyed by people in
groups. Some argue that music was one of the primary means by which early groups
of humans communicated and maintained the social bonds that held their
communities together.
Since the invention of music recording however, about a century ago,
technological developments have made the experience of music a more and more
private activity. Once music could be purchased for listening at home, the
possibility of enjoying music in private by yourself became a more and more
popular alternative to attending performances. This has led to our current iPod
era, where the most iconic image of a music listener is of a solitary individual
dancing with mp3 player and earphones attached, rather than the more social
concert or club audiences of earlier periods.
More recently, networking and new online media technologies have reversed this
trend to some extent, giving us new ways to form communities around music.
Napster showed us all how badly we want to share our music, and in spite of the
dogged resistance of the 'mainstream' music industry, technologies for sharing
music and other media online continue to grow in sophistication.
Most recently, virtual world environments such as Second Life have introduced a
significant new development, creating a virtual 3d space in which groups of fans
can listen to and experience music together in real-time. Of course virtual
reality tech like this has been around since the early 90s, but the last couple
years mark the first time that they have been easily accessible by a large
simultaneous user base.
We anticipate that virtual world technologies are likely to have a major impact
on the world of music in the near future. We will focus on Second Life here as
it currently has the most sophisticated in-world music scene.
Sharing the Experience of Music
People want to share music. This doesn't only mean passing mp3 files back and
forth, it means sharing the experience of music. It means sharing feelings about
it, sharing opinions and reactions, and talking about it in real time. For
example, we all spent time as teenagers lying on the floor listening to new
music and talking about it, and for many of us our musical tastes were one of
the main ways we identified with our friends.
While Internetworking technologies have revolutionized the modern music scene,
they have fallen short of replicating this one key element of musical
experience: shared reception, whether of one's own recent music purchases or of
a live concert.
The Internet, the Web and related networking technologies have brought great
change to the music world in the past decade, from mp3 music distribution to the
profusion of indie bands and producers promoting themselves on a MySpace page or
through their own websites.
Last.fm is a great example of how Web 2.0 technologies such as tagging,
folksonomies, ratings and recommendations from users with similar tastes can be
used to help listeners find new music they will enjoy.
However, although Last.fm bills itself as the 'social music revolution' and
tries its best to connect you with other listeners, even going so far as to show
you a page of images of other users whose tastes are similar to your own...
...yet just seeing some names of people who like the same music you do is not
the same thing as actually being with them and hearing the music together. The
2d asynchronous nature of the Web does not allow for this level of interaction
with others. Until now none of these online technologies could replicate the
experience of going to see and hear a live musical performance in the company of
other listeners.
Second Life provides an interesting and exciting extension to this. Through
avatars, users can seek out not only social experiences to listen to new music
in a shared context, but they can also search worldwide for the musical
subculture that best meets their tastes. A Second Life user can experience a
live performance from their dorm room in Ames, Iowa while the performer may be
in Berlin and other listeners/clubgoers scattered around the world.
While the user's avatar is dancing, the user can be speaking to fellow attendees
from all over the world. Casual conversations can easily happen, even more
easily than they could in a real life club.
Add to this one very un-real element of Second Life -- distance is never a
barrier. Users can teleport from one club to another merely by using the search
utility, finding another club with music they like, and clicking the teleport
button. The barrier of time and space is utterly nullified. The only barrier to
leaving would be social.
But, regardless of where the user ends up, she'll be there with other people.
They will experience the music at the same time, they will "share" the
experience of the music in the truest sense of the word.
Are We Not (walk)Men? No!
As with iPods and the Walkmen before them, listening to music online has been
largely a solo activity so far. The iPod advertisements were somewhat foreboding
in this respect, the individual reduced to lone dancing silhouette -- action
without social interaction. In so many situations, we listen alone.
However, Second Life is re-creating music online as a truly social event. The
music played live and streamed through Second Life is simultaneously experienced
by those gathered. This is a fundamental shift -- with Second Life broadcast
media and experiential media coalesce.
In Second Life, individuals gather to listen to live music and DJ mixes from
unknowns and mega-stars -- all from their own homes. Clubs in Second Life are
often hosts for after-hours parties. After clubbing in their home cities, people
will log in to Second Life to wind down before bed, visiting their favorite
virtual clubs and seeing their SL friends. As an artist is performing, so is the
audience receiving, experiencing and sharing his performance together. The
artist can also communicate easily with the audience via text chat. During a
performance, the audience will frequently react to a particularly impressive
part of a song in group chat. Concerts and other performances become
interactive, they become participatory.
Impact
Stay Tuned
In our opinion, the creation of virtual social spaces like Second Life where
music can be shared and experienced together is a development of potentially
huge import for the future of music, adding a major new dimension to what we've
seen so far with music on the Internet.
In particular, we see the online music sharing technologies that began with
Napster and mp3.com and leading to live virtual performances in Second Life
starting to reverse the trend towards music listening as a private activity that
we have seen ever since the birth of audio recording in the late 19th Century.
>From Napster to MySpace to last.fm to Second Life, increasingly sophisticated
social networking technologies are creating a new space of shared musical
experience online, and this trajectory will have a crucial influence on the
directions of social and musical change we are likely to see in our world in the
future.
J. LeRoy and I plan to continue looking at the Second Life music scene in future
and think about the impact of these developments in greater detail, stay
tuned...!
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